Founded in 1901 by disgruntled members of the Socialist Labor Party and other Socialist factions, the party became the most electorally successful left-wing party in US history. It reached a peak membership of almost 120,000 in 1912 and again in 1919, and drew about 3% of the national popular vote in the elections of 1904, 1908, 1916, and 1920 and 6% in 1912. During these years the Party elected congressmen from New York City and Milwaukee, several dozen state legislators and perhaps as many as a thousand local officials including mayors of such major cities as Milwaukee and Minneapolis.

As a result of the 1919 split within their ranks between the Party’s Old Guard and those that wanted the Party to join the emerging Communist movement and the effects of government repression, the Socialist Party collapsed in the early 1920s. The Party endorsed Progressive Party candidate Robert La Follette in the 1924 presidential campaign and that endorsement masked the Party’s weakness. La Follette drew nearly 17% of the national popular vote. Moreover La Follette had failed to achieve Progressive Party ballot status in several large states and only appeared there as a Socialist. Socialists could thus claim enough of the La Follette vote as their own to argue that their 1924 totals compared favorably to the percentages they had received between 1904 and 1920. But in 1928 when Norman Thomas made the first of his six presidential runs the Socialist vote was down to 0.7%.

The depression appeared to revive the Socialist Party in the early 1930s. Thomas expanded his presidential vote percentage to 2.2% in 1932, and in 1934 the Party elected mayors in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Reading, Pennsylvania. Thereafter the Party found itself caught between a rapidly expanding Communist Party on one side and a Democratic Party that shifted to the Left after 1934. A substantial portion of the Party membership and leadership, including David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman, leaders of International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (ACWU), two of the Party’s bastions, argued that Socialists should endorse FDR in 1936. When the top Party leadership refused to consider this, they seceded forming a rival Social Democratic Federation that did endorse Roosevelt. Thomas’s vote fell to 0.4% in 1936. The Party continued to run candidates thereafter—up to the present—but rarely did much better than other tiny left-wing factions such as the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) or the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Box 10

Folder

62

"Which Road for American Workers, Socialist or Communist?", January, 1936